Computers

Nearly one month ago I bought the third-generation Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon as one of the first laptops/ultrabooks shipping with a high-end Broadwell processor. I've been running Linux on the system since receiving it, including the past ~3 weeks as my main production system, and I remain very happy with this purchase.

As the latest Linux benchmark numbers to deliver for Intel Broadwell and the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon ultrabook, here's a nine-way Linux laptop/ultrabook comparison. All nine devices in this article were tested against the latest snapshot of Ubuntu 15.04 while running a big set of benchmarks and also monitoring the CPU temperatures and battery power consumption while testing for a nice look at Clarksfield/Nehalem, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, and Broadwell mobile hardware on Linux.

With wrapping up my Core i7 5600U Broadwell Linux tests using the new ThinkPad X1 Carbon in the next few days, fortunately the Intel BOXNUC5I3RYH just arrived as the first available NUC Kit shipping with a Broadwell processor. The NUC5i3RYH features a Broadwell Core i3 processor, HD Graphics 5500, and support for a M.2 SSD card and 2.5-inch HDD/SSD.

This week with the release of Phoronix Test Suite 5.4 we also announced LinuxBenchmarking.com, a collection of 32 systems running various upstream benchmarks on a daily basis in a fully automated manner. The daily upstream benchmarking ranges from the Linux kernel Git to Mesa to Arch/Antergos Linux to LLVM/Clang. Here's a walkthrough of the new lab housing this test farm where hundreds of benchmarks are run daily in looking for performance regressions and other changes with the upstream open-source code.

Last month in a preview article I mentioned I was testing CompuLab's Intense-PC2 and that it was a great Haswell-based mini Linux PC. After using it now for another month and putting it through its paces with many strenuous benchmarking workloads and trying out other Linux distributions, I remain enthusiastic about the Intense-PC2 and it being a great offering for Linux (and even Windows/BSD) users.

For the past month I've been testing out the CompuLab Intense-PC2 and it's been a terrific, small, Linux PC. The Intense-PC2 is packed with a low-power "Haswell ULT" Core i7 4600U processor and for some fresh Linux benchmarks I compared it to the former Sandy Bridge Core i7 3517UE and Intel Bay Trail Celeron N2820 NUC. For making things real interesting, I also ran some new benchmarks on an aging Intel Atom 330 system to show how the Intel low-power performance has been improving in recent years.

In complementing the earlier Linux 3.16 file-system tests on an SSD (and the later Btrfs testing), here are benchmarks of EXT4, XFS, and Btrfs from the Linux 3.15 and 3.16 kernels being compared from a traditional rotating hard drive.

The Precision PS10 is one of the most affordable ATX enclosures offered by SilverStone Technology. At $50 the expectations weren't incredibly high, but inside the case were surprises for both good and bad.

While it looks like most NVIDIA Jetson TK1 shipments were delayed (I've heard in Europe that they're not coming out as well until mid-May, matching what NewEgg and Micro-Center are now advertising), to much excitement I found out last night my Jetson TK1 ARM board shipped out and it's already arrived this morning. Here's my unboxing and first look at this new high-end ARM board featuring the Tegra K1 SoC that sports Kepler graphics.

As I wrote about at the beginning of March, I bought the ASUS Zenbook UX301LA-DH71T Haswell-based ultrabook to replace an Apple Retina MacBook Pro as my main system. I've been using this latest Zenbook with Intel Iris Graphics and dual SSDs for several weeks now as my main system and have taken it on four business trips so far and it's been running great. Paired with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, the ASUS Zenbook UX301LA makes a rather nice lightweight yet powerful Linux system.